Resistance to drugs, such as antibiotics, is a serious problem. Drug resistance is limiting the effectiveness of most currently used antimicrobial agents. Infectious organisms are becoming resistant to even the most recently developed antimicrobials that target essential steps in cell wall assembly and protein biosynthesis. Thus, there is a need in the art for new antimicrobials with different modes of action.
Most current antimicrobials target either cell wall biosynthesis or DNA replication. The higher population of microbes that have developed resistance to the available front-line antibiotics requires new drug molecules which can act through different mechanisms to thwart this developing resistance. Finding and validating new targets offers the best hope of finding new drugs with different modes of action. Furthermore, introducing species-selectivity can further delay the development of drug resistance. It would therefore be advantageous to develop new antimicrobial drugs that are species selective and act through a mechanism other than by targeting cell wall biosynthesis or DNA replication.